Regarding 3): most benchmarks I've seen quote 2-7% difference in IPC to Intel. I wouldn't call that low/mid-range. Am I misunderstanding something?
(i.e. argued that way this would be more like "setting up for failure" on AMDs part.)
For the average consumer, every high end system they have seen in recent memory is Intel, and every ad they have seen is Intel, and if they have seen AMD at all it has always been positioned as a budget product.
That is going to take a long time for AMD to turn around assuming they can sustain performance parity with Intel.
That is also why AMD is focused on servers and semi-custom where they are selling to technical people who are evaluating based on price/performance and not based on brand perception.
XBox One's processor is from a pre-Ryzen generation, so this should not be a concern. :-)
Imho parent was talking about the PC sector and in that regard, AMD has been sadly trailing way behind Intel/Nvidia for quite a while now. AMD has struggled to oppose Intel's i5/i7 dominance. Similarly, they still have no real competition for the high-end NVidia GPU's, like the 1080's.
If money is not a limiting factor, then you will be hard-pressed to come up with a build that does not include an Intel CPU and at least one Nvidia GPU.
If money is not a limiting factor, you probably look at AMD EPYC now.
Ryzen helped some with that but afaik Intel's chips are still way ahead in terms of single-thread performance, which is something many desktop users (like gamers) are looking for.
On one hand, it's cool to have i5's/i7's last so long, on the other hand, it's never a good situation when there's no real competition. Too bad Intel didn't pull through with Larrabee, a third player in the dedicated GPU market would have made this whole situation way more interesting/dynamic.
Tho could just as well have resulted in AMD going belly up, trying to compete against Intel and Nvidia vs the current situation sounds like it would been a worse deal for AMD.
AMD are on the brink of offering products that for the first time since forever at least has potential to build up their brand vs Intel, to actually have a significant differentiator that they can market. It seems really harsh to kill that before it even begins. But yeah, it could actually be a sign that AMD knows it couldn't go the whole nine yards in this game anyway.
I've had friends go out to buy a computer and insist on an i7 because "it is the best."
Same people who buy the newest Samsung Galaxy every year.
But i9 is the best... ;-)
When I see "Intel Inside", I immediately think "Intel Inside - Idiot Outside". ;-)
CPUs aren't the bottleneck though, disk I/O and I/O in general are where most "slowness" issues are promulgated from.
But this is server compute stuff which this news doesn’t seem to be about.